Comedy Choice

In the summer of 1979, when London's Comedy Store became Britain's first alternative comedy club, John Cooper Clarke was already on the front cover of NME. Eighteen years later he's still going strong, and there's no better way celebrate April Fool's Day this Tuesday than in his convivial and stimulating company Downstairs At The Kings Head. Clarke has often been unfairly pigeonholed as a punk poet, and although his poems do describe a similar inner-city landscape in a comparably spare and streetwise style, his importance as a writer and performer stretches far beyond the finite boundaries of seventies New Wave. Clarke's rat-a-tat rhymes are far funnier than the throwaway gags of almost any stand-up, and his dispassionate fast-forward delivery gives them a momentum that's as invigorating as the purest pop music. Yet on the printed page, his perfect couplets often seem far more wistful, as silent readers are suddenly struck by their true literary worth, which puts them right up there with Britain's finest popular verse. Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt, first published in 1983, remains a masterful slim volume, featuring such high-rise classics as Kung Fu International and I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

However, he's since penned plenty of new numbers that can compete with meisterwerks like Valley Of The Lost Women or the unbeatable Beezley Street (surely Beasley Street - Webmaster). He's also still an instinctive entertainer who can command and enchant his audiences as well as any younger one-line wag, and last summer's show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the tighest gig of his I've seen for years. His cartoon aesthetic straddles a host of pulp influences, from gothic melodrama to cod sci-fi, but above all, this Salford bard has done what all true artists dream of doing: he has found his own unique voice.

William Cook

Thanks to SPG for sending it to us.

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